Category: Media

Let’s say you own a pizza shop, and want to accomplish two things:

1. Attract more people to your establishment

2. Inflict some damage on the competition

What can you do? According to brand guru Martin Lindstrom, here’s what an Australian shop did:

Instead of spreading money between off- and online ads, it spent the entire budget on radio. The spots were simple but extremely effective. So effective, the restaurant’s increased business caused most of the local competition to shut down…

The pizza place’s radio ads asked listeners to tear out all the pizza-restaurant pages from their yellow pages and bring them in. In return for the pages, customers received a free pizza of their choice and a sticker with the restaurant’s URL.

Because the contact information for all the other pizza joints in town disappeared from customers’ primary reference source, only one set of contact details was left in households that complied… the restaurant that dreamed up the promotion.

This particular shop used radio — the same approach would have worked just as well on television. More important than the medium of choice was the fact that the shop chose to concentrate the attack in one place.

And before I go, here’s a legal note, insisted upon by the Bernstein Worldwide Legal Department: I am not suggesting that you do something like this. But if you do, let me know how it goes.

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I spent fifteen years selling radio advertising for a 7-station group that included a variety of formats. Although I was expected to sell all of them (and did, thank you very much), I came to believe that pound-for-pound, my two news/talk stations were much more effective advertising vehicles than my music stations.

The advertising agencies were more concerned with ratings, and buying the market at a certain cost-per point. But the clients who carefully measured response to their advertising found that they got results from news/talk that were well out-of-proportion to what Arbitron’s numbers would have predicted.

A look at why that might be comes from an English study of drivers done by the Transport Research Laboratory. According to the  Telegraph, [hat tip to Radio-Info for bringing this to my attention] sports radio listeners’ reaction times behind the wheel were similar to those of drunk drivers.

Reactions can be slowed by up to 20 per cent scientists at the Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) found – adding a six metre stopping time if a car is travelling at 70mph.

The report said: “To put this into context, this increase in distance travelled is 10 per cent further than the additional stopping distance when driving with a blood alcohol level at the UK legal limit (80mg/ml).

The number of incidents of hard breaking at the last minute almost doubled when motorists were listening to sports commentary.

Bad news for public safety, but great news for the format’s ad sales department — people are paying awfully close attention to what’s on.

I never had a sports station, but I did have a Progressive Talk station — the audience was relatively small but it was passionate, and the advertisers got great results. On the other side of the dial, Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura also really delivered. Agency buyers staring at rankers never understood that, but my results-measuring direct clients did.

The lesson for advertisers seems to be the same: people don’t put talk radio on in the background — if it’s on, they listen.

Sometimes, perhaps, a little too hard.

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Looking to break into the fast-paced, rewarding world of advertising sales? You could start your career — and probably finish it — with this new niche publication.

According to the New York Times, Al Qaeda has launched an English-language magazine.

A PDF of the magazine — the first known English-language publication thought to be produced by the Yemen-based terrorist group — began circulating on the Internet on Wednesday. The magazine’s goal is to recruit disaffected Muslims in the United States, Canada, Britain and other English-speaking countries.

To apply, send your resume and cover letter to www.fbi.gov.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Got a question? Wanna argue? Email Phil Bernstein here.

Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here.

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